On Prophecy and Revelation in the Virtuous City: Towards Establishing a Viable Framework for Re-Contextualizing al-Fārābī

Abstract

Though relatively unknown to non-specialists, Abū Naṣr al-Fārābī is a fundamental member of the community of Muslims who founded Islamic Philosophy. In his tenth-century work, On the Perfect State, al-Fārābī tackles questions of eminent importance to society of Muslims still deciding who they were. These questions and their inevitable solutions were, for a time, a source of much turmoil for the young Ummah; and we argue that the Perfect State should be read as an effort to take part in, even to lead, the conversation that would decide how these questions were answered. A school of thought championed by Richard Walzer argues that the most important thing to know about al-Fārābī is that he repeated in Arabic many things already said better in Greek by the ancients. According to this school of thought, al-Fārābī’s main intention was to transmit specifically Greek learning to posterity, not to participate in the world of Islam and Muslims. It is our contention that this view is mistaken and misleading. Through an examination of tenth-century Islamic history, a close reading of al-Fārābī’s work in Arabic, and a thorough discussion of the mistakes made by the Walzerian school of thought, we will show that al-Fārābī used philosophy as a tool for solving problems particular to the Muslim community of his age.